I have this question for the veteran Turbotax community and turbotax support team. I have been filing taxes using turbotax for more than a decade now and every time I file state taxes I realize that Turbotax for federal is very good but it sucks equally when it comes to states. Since the live assist has started I have been getting help from an expert to file CA taxes. I have seen even the experts struggle when it comes to CA filing. This year it was worse so thought I will write this and clarify.
We live outside of the country right now; We own a rental in CA so every year and we file as a Non resident CA taxes(540 NR).
This year, we did a 1031 exchange where we sold a rental property from one state and bought in another state. Both are different states than CA. Now, I completed the like kind exchange in Turbotax federal. I also completed the rental portions for both the old and new rentals in Turbotax for federal.
Now, when I started CA state taxes, turbotax seem to have pulled all the 1031 exchange data from federal, it has also pulled the rental details for all the non-CA houses and it started showing me questions around all this which confused the heck out of me.
So I got an expert help who has been working with Turbotax for 7-8 years and was quite knowledgeable but he couldn't figure out what was going on. He did his own research for almost an hour and then said none of this data matters for CA so lets just respond to what we can, at the end it will only use the CA Only data. I could see he was not confident and although we managed to get rid of all the errors at the end, I am not confident with my CA filing either. I look at previous years and looks like the same case(turbotax pulls non-relevant states data even for Non-reisdent CA filing)
I hope someone can shed some light on this and explain why Turbotax does this.
